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Ok... So this is my third thread to start today, and I am feeling more like a newbie than I did one year ago when I got back into the hobby. Plants are a whole new ball game.

So in my tank I have and i will use common names since not all know the Latin’s by heart and they are as follows:

Wyisteria, Moneywort, Red Mellon Sword, Broadleaf Ludwigia

I did the math, and my 24" 17 Watt Fluorescent Lamp - 65354
from all Glass Aquarium is woefully inadequate and I need to go brighter, the aquarium store quoted me 155 dollars. That’s steep. So the calculations said I need at least 100-130w of bulbage so the questions are as follows:

1) Can I change the 24" bulb with a higher watt 24" bulb without changing the ballasts? The idea is to get as much wattage with the stock hood as I can.

2) If not then, can I use the current stock hood and replace the ballasts for a better wattage and if so is it more so costly to do so than buying the new hood and two lights that I was quoted at the rate of $155.

3) Is it plausible if not esthetically viable to utilize other forms of illumination that either work in conjunction with the stock hood (if ballasts can be kept for higher wattage bulb) or use in conjunction with the stock light in the hood or replace the system entirely (i.e. shop light or incandescent grow bulbs that are directed into the tank from sides or back etc.

The next issue is the cO2 apparently it is a to part problem. The ph of my tank is on the high side because tap water is high on the ph, the lfs said to change water with bottled water till the ph comes down so that the co2 is in a form usable by the plants, but i failed to ask if the bottled water purchased and the water that you can buy from the little fill your own container for a quarter systems are just as good (not sure if it is ro or uv or both or what... Anyone have any idea?

The second problem is the co2 levels in the tank. I keep hearing of ways to do it but the lfs said they had one for 55 dollars after the extra cartridges and the baffles... but i hear that there are many ways to tackle this problem including using a yeast solution. But there aren’t any instructions on building the baffles or anything specific that I have found for making stuff like this. Does anyone know of any pages or books that I can look at that will give me a good idea on how this stuff goes together?

Again all your help has been much appreciated

As for putting the higher wattage bulb in a lower watt pumping ballast is definaltley a bad idea. There are a few different ways to upgrade lighting. Most of them are costly, but what you might want to try is www.AHsupply.com
Its basically like Ikea, you buy the parts and put it together yourself. Right not with the low lights the plants won't need as much Co2 than if you have brighter lights(more wpg). So until the lighting is upgraded you might be able to get away with no Co2, just dose the tank with Flourish Excel. Which has Carbon in it. The plants that you are getting sound pretty good, the sword plant takes in its nutrients thru the root, so make sure you have a nutrient rich substrate or use root tabs. The water bought from the store should be Spring water, which I feel is very good. Evian has a higher PH because of the disolved mineral content. Try Crystal Guyser (sp?) it has a lower PH. i used the bottled kind myself tho. Never tried the pull up and fill stands. You guess is as good as mine.


Last edited by thetunnelfades at 24-Oct-2005 17:23

Last edited by thetunnelfades at 24-Oct-2005 17:26

Ok thanks... I was thinking of just going to a hardware store and getting a small light fixture and grow lights... it was just a thought though

CF bulbs are probably the next best step to increasing lighting AHsupply will let you do it DIY so you can customize the system.

whats the gallonage of this tank?

as for the CO2 business. pH does not affect the CO2 uptake of plants. a high pH more than likyly means you have harder water which means that it has some buffering capabilities(meaning it can resist a drastic change in pH). the upside of this is that you can add CO2 to the tank and not have to really worry about pH fluctuations. This is of course assuming you use DIY CO2, compressed CO2 is another ballgame. the most used method for CO2 is using yeast as you stated earlier. Just google DIY CO2 and you should get links to a bunch of different recipies. DIY is effective and cheap compared to the purchaseable alternatives.

HTH,
Megil

Soft water has the same amount of CO2 as hard water.

If you want to add more CO2, well.......
Add more CO2, softening, adding RO/Bottled water will not add CO2, it will only reduce the pH some, but it does not add CO2.

To add CO2, use CO2 gas.
pH/KH are used to measure CO2, but changing them with things other than CO2, is not going to add CO2.


Seems silly but many try to reduce their pH in effort to add more CO2, or have the miscoception that lower pH's are better.

Plants do not care about the pH, they care about CO2, it's 40% of the biomass or more.

pH is not part of their biomass nor are pH reducers other than CO2.

We add CO2 to make the plants grow much better, it is a fertilizer but does much better than typical terrestrial ferts. They can get 30-40% higher yields for enriched CO2 gas, but submersed aquatics can grow 1000% faster with CO2 enrichmnet becuase the water is very poor in CO2 and the transfer and thick visocity slows the transfer down about 10,000 times slower.


Regards,
Tom Barr

www.BarrReport.com

Well the aquatic environment poses benefits and disadvantages that terrestrial plants don't have. The most ovbious disadvantage is that CO2 concentration in the water can decrease rapidly with surface agitation aas the aqueous gas leaves the solution and enters the atmosphere. This is also do to diffusion, liquids have a much higher concentration than gases, since the molecules are so much closer than in the gaseous stage.

The benefits come that gaseous mixtures are diffused over a very large area, there is alot of deadspace between particles making them more dispersed and less concentrated, even with CO2 concentrated gas the chance of CO2 passing through the stomata is quite small.

In a liquid the molecules are much more closely bound so you can get a much higher concentration. and since the molecules are closer together it is more likely for the CO2 to be recieved by a plant.

The importance of CO2 it that it is essentially where the carbon in organic compounds comes from. the more CO2 a plant has, the more organic molecules it can produce (usually a high energy storing sugar which can then be broken down to make proteins, lipids, etc. Also the higher the CO2 concentration the more likely that rubisco (the enzyme that binds CO to a 5caarbon sugar) is to bind with CO2 instead of O2(which results in a process called photorespiration that only depletes the plants energy supply.

Alright now I am rambling I should really stop shouldn't I. Anyways CO2 is important and Tom is right, while pH and hardness can be affected by CO2, it is not the only variable in the equation.

apologies for the rambling and HTH,
Megil.

P.S. pH does actually affect plant activity, as enzymes and pH gradients fuel much of cellular reactions and energy production. but that is a tale for another time yes.

I think that i am miscommunicating what the lfs had to say. It was something in reguards to the higher ph alters the fourm of the co2 andI dont exactly know what he was saying, darn my short term memory. Either way I know that the RO/Bottled water wont add C02 I don't have misconseptions about that, but I am gathering the stuff to put togehter the CO2 rig and will have it done by wednesday. As for the lighting situation I am not sure what the Acronyms for CF and AHsuplly (sorry Megil this lighting thing is completly new to me) Who knew plants would be so tough.

MQW

Ok I added a yeast reactor, it is bubbling and has created a pool of air that is about half way down the bell of the one liter reactor I poked little holes in the neck just below the cap with a hot needle and when the pressure gets to great it bubbles out of them and into the output of my aquaclear 50. I hope this will give the poor plants some air to breathe. I am probably going to get at least two 20w bulbs and some plexi glass and rig them up so I will have almost 60w on the plants. I will still need to add two more wich I may be able to do. Crosing my fingers. Are normal flourecent(sp bad) worthless to the plants? I had found some lamps that came with bulbs but I think they are usless... am I right about that?

Ok, my 29 gallon dropped in ph 1.2 points, so I took the C02 reactor out. and it came up to 7.2 so it did a major yo yo and I lost two fish one new and one old. All other levels are fine so it leads me to belive that it was the PH yoyo that caused it. I was hoping that it would be a bit more stable. How many bubbles per minute should I have, I dont want to loose anymore fish due to the yoyo, or another drastic drop.